So long as physiologists continued to believe that man had not existed on the earth above six thousand years, they might, with good reason, withhold … - Charles Lyell

One extraordinary fiction of the Egyptian mythology was the supposed intervention of a masculo-feminine principle, to which was assigned the development of the embryo world, somewhat in the way of incubation. For the doctrine was, that when the first chaotic mass had been produced, in the form of an egg, by a self-dependent and eternal Being, it required the mysterious functions of this masculo-feminine demi-urgus to reduce the component elements into organized forms.

As breeders of domestic animals, when they choose certain varieties in preference to others to breed from, speak technically of their method as that of 'selecting,' Mr. Darwin calls the combination of natural causes, which may enable certain varieties of wild animals or plants to prevail over others of the same species, 'natural selection.'

Steno conceded, as Fabio Colonna had done before him, that all marine fossils might have been transported into their present situation at the time of the Noachian deluge. He maintained that fossil vegetables had been once living plants, and he hinted that they might, in some instances, indicate the distinction between fluvial and marine deposits. He also inferred that the present mountains had not existed ever since the origin of things, suggesting that many strata of submarine origin had been accumulated in the interval between the creation and deluge. Here he displayed his great anxiety to reconcile his theory with the Scriptures; for he at the same time advanced an opinion, which does not seem very consistent with such a doctrine, viz., that there was a wide distinction between the shelly, and nearly horizontal beds at the foot of the Apennines, and the older mountains of highly inclined stratification. Both, he observed, were of sedimentary origin; and a considerable interval of time must have separated their formation. Tuscany, according to him, had successively passed through six different states; and to explain these mighty changes, he called in the agency of inundations, earthquakes, and subterranean fires.